Can ROON support folder browsing. [not on roadmap]

  • As many audiophile use ROON have same issue concern why ROON don’t support folder browsing.
  • I have 100K songs with 20K album and I keep them my folder structure layer for easy to find. For sure I can not remember some artist / Album or song name which normally when use ROON you have to remember to find album song you want to listen.
  • I understand that now roon supporting tag. But it’s not enough, and ROON user need to find each single Album to tag it, that’s not useful way and waste so much time. At least for tag whether roon can have feature which can auto tagging by Folder path ?
  • ANd for longterm I would like to recommend and many audiophile might have same proposal ROON to support folder browsing.

Hi Jacky and welcome to Roon.

As someone who has requested this myself (as with a large Library it can sometimes be very useful), I can tell you to save your breath.
Just not going to happen as it’s seems to be against the Roon Ethos (probably best not to ask)

I’d you ask that question 3 time’s you will find out who Danny is. You don’t want to go there :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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@Jacky_Le - you’re new around here, so naturally unaware of the long history of the “folder browsing” discussions. Have a look through the #feedback:feature-suggestions category of the forum for threads on this topic.

Bottom line - it’s never going to happen. Here’s Danny:

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I think it depends on how you got used to do it. It is painful not to have the tools you are used to. I got lucky, my first music library was build after I got used with database software from Lightroom. At first it was hard to do. To have just date folders with 5k photos of my work for the last 15 years. After 3 weeks of tagging and keywording all the new photos that were coming in, had to be properly tag and keyword. And the downside is that now I cannot find anything without Adobe :slight_smile: (I would have to remember when I did scan or photo a specific image within 30 years). So I did trade my folder sistem just to use a more flexible sistem.

Or unless tagging feature need to improve more to automatically tagging base on folder name. It will support user alot to waste time manually adding with more than 10K album.

Many my audiophile friends consider not to buy ROON because about this album tagging, folder browsing. This feature I believe can help ROON app to get more user .

Oh that’s bad news. I though it can going to support in near feature. Hopefully Roon team change the mindset and we going to have this feature in feature :frowning:

I don’t understand why folder searching helps? If you can’t remember the artist, song name or album name, how does a folder search help?

And if you know any of the above, it should be very easy to use roons tools to find it. I cannot imagine something as inconvenient as a folder search when roon gives us hugely powerful search and filter tools that work just fine.

What am I missing here?

If you want folder search, dump roon and just use any random upnp server. You’ll save money.

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They know that. From Danny’s post that was quoted above:

There is no folder browsing coming to Roon because it promotes behavior we don’t want to exist. We feel that it, like UPnP support would get us more sales short term at the cost of our souls (and future).

I’m 100% comfortable with my 100% dependence with adobe. Now with roon I’ve just started so still back up all my streaming playlist to 1. Tidal 2. Spotify 3. YT. But if history is reapeating I’ll end up 100% dependent on roon.

With local files it is easier, back up the original ones and the ones that roon is using. Sorry I haven’t look in the file management with roon. For the moment I have only 16 trans locally.

For small no of files you can keep track of them from inside roon and from outside. I guess that makes you feel more independent while still using roon.

When going up in no of files I’ll have to 100% use roon, maybe some are feeling uncomfortable with that. Years ago when the only digital files I had were mp3 from cd’s I was using iTunes to organise local files. If I want to have a look back I have to open iTunes

I cannot think another reasons, maybe there are

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What I don’t get: I use Roon exclusively but still have the folders on the drive organized in other ways, without a problem. This is my top level:

If for some reason I can’t find something in Roon (which never happens), I can still browse or search my folder tree with the file manager. (Edit: and even move them around)

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Why would I want to use folders it’s part of the reason I chose Roon. Can’t stand folder browsing especially to find music.

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I get that a lot of other software has a folder structure.

I also get that a lot of us grew up with folders in computers and used it as a very simple database to keep track of data, not just music.

But Roon is a true database, and as such, it’s much more powerful.

Think of Google photos. You don’t have a folder view there. But you can sort by date, it will also auto suggest things if you search on people’s names and events such as weddings.

With metadata, tags and focus, Roon can link everything together.

Want to search all British indie from the 90’s? 3 focus selections and you are there. In a folder structure, you actually have to remember which bands were there and navigate manually.

I also tagged all the MTV unplugged albums. Now I just have to hit that tag to display all of those albums.

The whole point of Roon is to do something better than folders, to link all the music together. And those links allow it to make suggestions for new music for you.

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In discussions \about folder structures vs search and tags, actual data helps, so I go back to Steve Whittaker (et al)'s user studies:

http://students.lti.cs.cmu.edu/11899/files/cp3a-whittaker-sidner.pdf

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Windows can index properties of known files, so you should be able to search in Explorer.

Thank you. I do no how to use search for the metadata edited in Adobe (for sure there is a workaround). The folders are by year/month/day, probably I can use other metadata but I would have to remember dates, camera, etc. I think same is for roon or maybe not. Can you use os search for the tags that you created in roon to find the labeled files?

No, because Roon promises to not alter your files. (You can export from Roon though, which apparently writes metadata to file tags - but I don’t know which and how well it works, never tried it)

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Yes, search can only index properties stored in files. That’s why I think it’s better to tag your own files so that you don’t depend on a particular app.

Yes that sounds like a good thing to do. I’ll have to remember that.

But how you do that? just put longer file names?

Use a separate tag editor. (The tags are embedded in the file data, not the file names)

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